


the dose makes it

by mnemememory



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, implied Beau/Yasha, mentioned Beau/Keg, spoilers for episode 26
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 01:47:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15985001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemememory/pseuds/mnemememory
Summary: Insomnia is a subtle, bitter poison.(or; the mighty nein haven't had a good night's sleep since the three were taken)





	the dose makes it

...

...

**the dose makes it**

…

…

Insomnia is a subtle, bitter poison.

Beau is dead by the third night, with webs in her eyes and spots on the horizon. There’s little to do but watch the sky and wait for morning, but it’s hard when everything feels so washed out and hollow. She cracks her jaw open and struggles to breathe through her nose, content with – something. Content with her mind on fire, maybe.

Mollymauk gives her a grim smile and watches the sun burn itself into existence across the treetops. There are bruises under his eyes, a wild look to his sharp features.

“Didn’t you sleep?” Beau says, the morning thick in her throat.

“Didn’t you?” Molly says. His voice is teasing, but his eyes are stone cold.

Caleb and Nott are by the fire, shaking at a groggy Keg to get her up and moving. _Wake up_ , Caleb says. It’s early enough that the air hasn’t had a chance to warm; frost still sits like film, frozen lace atop densely packed mud. There is little heat to be found in this barren lie of a world.

Beau snorts and shakes her head. Everything is heavy. She wants to yawn, but it hasn’t done her any good before. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says.

Mollymauk doesn’t reply, but the sleepless, gleaming look in his eyes says enough.

…

…

(After –

Well, after.

Afterwards, Beau wonders about it. She wonders a lot of things about Mollymauk Tealeaf and his coat of many colours; she wonders about his constant smile, the infuriating lies, the tarot cards she holds heavy in her hands. She wonders about sweet dreams, and of making the world a better place. She wonders how he could stand it, being so wonderful in a world that very clearly wasn’t.

But mostly, when Beau thinks about Molly, she thinks about sitting around a campfire with people pretending to be asleep, staring at the stars and searching desperately for ghosts.

_This is ridiculous_ , she wants to remember saying. _I’ve only known these people for a few weeks, and already I feel so lost without them. I feel like I’ve been caught off balance. It’d ridiculous._

Moly would have said something vague and annoying, if he’d had the chance. That was always the way with him – or at least, it felt like it. Trying to fill in impressions between lies and smiles. There isn’t much of Molly that feels real, looking back.

They sat there in silence and stared up and out, above the trees and into the velvet darkness. Death row without the creeping paralysis; bright in a way Beau could never be, no matter how close or far she knew her own impending demise to be.

_You’d better not have any regrets_ , Beau thinks, even though she knows he had at least one).

…

…

Things get a little better on the first night, with Caleb’s bluebell fire a solid thing around them. Beau grips Jester tighter than she ever thought possible, stares at Fjord as he curls to the side, drinks in Yasha’s unconscious face. It’s small, and slightly cramped, and Beau lets out a breath she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding.

They’re here. _They’re here_ , and they’re safe, and –

She slips out, when it all gets too heavy, when the sharp lack of sleep aches like a physical presence and she needs something to remind her what’s real. Keg is all rough edges and tough forearms and she’s gorgeous, they’re gorgeous together. They laugh in a house that demanded nightmares, and it’s so wonderful. Beau rolls over, exhales, and sleeps.

…

…

Unfortunately, as things are so want to do, morning breathes new fear into Beau’s still exhausted mind.

“Good morning,” she says, acid a rancid taste at the back of her throat.

“Good morning, Beau!” Jester says. She sounds bright enough to ache. Looking at her now, she’s tired, blue skin wan and smile shockingly brittle. _There’s no way_ , Beau thinks, and she goes to hug Jester all over again.

Fjord’s presence is a steadying weight that Beau hadn’t even known she’d been missing (lie, lie, lie) – she listens to the deep timber of his voice and struggles to contain the massive, raw burst of joy that threatens to consume her. Relief makes her muscles ache with unreleased tension. She’s shaking with the release. Seeing her friends here, awake (so awake), it’s the best thing she’s ever known.

Yasha does not wake up.

Beau steadies herself next to the girl without wings, kneels down to press a hand to her hair. Yasha’s pale, bleached skin still crackles with the aftermath of Jester’s magic, pink sparks stitching across scarred skin. She doesn’t look quite real, lying on the ground with blood on her face. Something horrible rests just beneath her expression, shoulders wound tight enough to break. _This is not the sleep I want_ , Beau thinks, and tries to mean it. This is not peace. This is anything but.

“Wake up,” Beau says, and her voice sounds foreign to her own ears. She’s lying, too. She needs Yasha to keep on sleeping, forever and ever, until the world ends and the sky splits black lightning forth to wreck whatever’s left. Beau needs Yasha to keep on sleeping, because when she wakes up –

When Yasha wakes up, she will be alive in a world without her best friend. Beau is, at the heart of it all, a coward. She doesn’t want to look at that kind of grief.

…

…

Yasha wakes up anyway.

…

…

The settle into it, an odd routine that sands away rough edges and leaves everything else a broken thing of what it once was. There are two empty spaces next to them on a cart that Molly has never, not once, sat on.

“Does it bother you?” Beau asks, once, when she’s very drunk and it’s very late. The week stretches out like a ribbon, long and blood-red. “We’re using the cart that you were –”

She cuts herself off. _That you were kidnapped it_ , she was saying. Jester gets the message anyway, because Jester is many things, but stupid has never been one of them.

“Not really,” she says. She touches her wrists, where scars rope long and thing into blue skin. Beau wants to reach out and touch her, make sure she’s still real and not some figment of her exhausted imagination. “It was very different. And very dark.”

“Are you okay with it?” Beau says. She wants to know. She’s _desperate_ to know. They can’t keep going on, not like this, if any aspect of that stupid fucking cart is going to cause Jester anymore nightmares than she already has. Beau will go downstairs _right now_ and burn it.

(Neither sleep at night, not really. They compare stories and make jokes and blink as sunlight filters, dizzying in its entirety, through the window of their shared bedroom).

Jester thinks about it for a long time. Beau sort of dozes off but also sort of doesn’t, alcohol lending weight to her eyelids.

“I was very scared,” she says, finally. “It wasn’t very nice. It was dark, and there were people everywhere, all around me. Fjord was there, and Yasha, but we were all tied up so tight I couldn’t feel my arms. We tried to talk, but we were gagged. The cages were too small for all of us.”

“Jester…” Beau says.

“It is very different, now, when we travel like that,” Jester says. “There’s so much room. I can stretch out my legs are far as they can go, and I’ve still got room. And the illusion makes me feel – safe. Just a little bit. It is very nice, knowing that I can stay inside and no one can see me.”

“We’ll always be able to see you,” Beau says. She is _very_ drunk.

Jester smiles and nods, reaching over to pat Beau on the head. “You are very good friends,” she says. “As soon as Fjord gets back, I’ll tell him that he is a very good friend, too. Yasha as well. I was sure you were coming to get us.”

Beau snorts and knuckles at her eyes, because she’s _not sniffling_ , goddamn. Her reputation must be in tatters, by now.

“You’re a good friend, too,” she says. It’s worth it, for Jester’s smile.

…

…

“I don’t know how she can keep smiling,” Fjord says. It’s just the two of them, at a bar, laying low and drowning out steam. “I can’t.”

Beau knocks back another glass. “Things can’t be so bad,” she says. “So long as she can keep smiling.”

Fjord’s face is strained. “She can’t be lying,” he says, like a prayer. Beau doesn’t want to know about what went down in that basement, with those cages and those pokers and those manacles, but curiosity peeks its ugly head out every once and a while.

What she knows, for certain, for sure, is this: Fjord is so close to breaking.

Beau doesn’t say: _I can’t tell, anymore_.

Beau doesn’t say: _I’m worried about her. I’m worried about both of you. I’m worried about all three of you_.

Beau absolutely does not say: _I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in almost a month. The air feels solid. The ground moves beneath my feet. I can’t concentrate, I can’t focus. I keep jumping from one thing to another. I’m worried that if I go to sleep, I’m going to wake up and none of you will be here anymore_.

Beau says, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

…

…

This is why Beau needs sleep. _This is so very much why Beau needs sleep_. Gods, look at what happens when she doesn’t – she loses her mind and she _buys an owl_.

The thing stares at her with a familiar kind of ambivalence. She sees it every time she looks in the mirror, every time she catches her eye on a reflective surface. _Why are you bothering me_? it seems to say. Beau is thoroughly sick of herself.

She narrows her eyes at the owl. It blinks back. It is an owl. It has very large eyes.

“What the fuck,” she says in a low, traumatised whisper.

Please, gods, let this be a dream.

…

…

It is not a dream.

…

…

There isn’t a fix to the thing in her head, not really.

Poison drips, drips, drips down the back of her throat, and she numbs the burn with alcohol, with lies ( _I am fine, you are fine_ ), with laughter. A lot of it is real. Beau isn’t good at misdirection – it forms, awkward and heavy, on her tongue and sticks to her throat like tar. What Beau says is, _Everything is fine_ , and that’s more of an extended form of truth than any one thing she says. Creative storytelling. Everything _will_ be fine, eventually, with time. Beau has to believe that.

Sleep comes from a variety of things, one of which is exhaustion.

(This is the thing they do not say:

_We’ll sleep in shifts_. At any one point, they huddle together under Caleb’s blanket of light and stare at the stars, just like before. Molly’s weight does not leave. Yasha’s absence is a missed step on a stairway; uncomfortable at the best of times, sickening at the worst. Horrible, wretched screams echo in their ears and snow-drenched hilltops are stamped to their eyelids.

_We’ll sleep in shifts_ , they do not say, even in closed spaces with doors and locks. Caleb threads silver wire along the edges of their own little corner of everything and promises, with magic and fire and blood in his eyes, that this will never happen again.

_Please_ , Beau thinks, desperation clawing broken fingernails and bleeding stubs at the back of her mind; _Please, let this never happen again_ ).

But –

(But –)

Beau is sitting on the ground (on the floor) (on the cart), clutching Jester’s scarred, warm wrist, listening as Fjord laughs at something slow and subtly hilarious that Caduces says. Nott is tucked into Jester’s other side, watching at the fire with rapt attention. Caleb sits with Frumpkin on his lap, eyes closed, a contented smile sloping along the edges of his mouth.

(Somewhere, a woman with mismatched eyes and a hole in her heart stares up at the same sky as a storm gathers, lightning an awful light).

(Somewhere, the indistinct and shapeless existence of the thing once known as Mollymauk Tealeaf is smiling).

This is the poison: Beau sleeps. She does not dream.

…

…

**Author's Note:**

> I am once again back to melodrama! I have so few pleasures in life, please don't take this from me. I was really tempted to make this cracky, though - I've done some *shit* while high on a lack of sleep. It's my equivalent to being drunk. Melodrama won, obvs.
> 
> Prompt fill for theclockistickingwrite: "the mighty nein haven't had a good night's sleep since the three were taken". I hope I did okay! 
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://mnemememory.tumblr.com/). I'm open for prompts at the moment, if you feel like enabling me :)


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